Corporate sustainability efforts often involve organizations reducing and recycling waste and becoming more energy efficient—all important activities that contribute to the well-being of our planet. However, these initiatives can only go so far when it comes to making positive, long-lasting change.

Envirotech has long been a champion for bringing the circular economy model to the world of office furniture through their effective remanufacturing, reuse, and repurposing services.

“Our goal is to help organizations understand that diverting something from a landfill just once only achieves short-term environmental results,” says Andy Delisi, Director of Business Development at Envirotech. “Employing true circularity, where materials from furnishings are put to active use during their entire lifespans is how businesses can really make a difference.”

While the use of remanufactured or refurbished furniture has always been acknowledged as a means for cost saving by businesses, it has seldom been recognized as a strategy for environmental stewardship—until now. This has been evidenced during the past year by an increase in the number of office furniture tenders/requests for bids that now specify that a certain percentage of the proposed solution must incorporate reused or remanufactured products. It is a trend that Envirotech hopes is here to stay.

More than 1 million pounds of functional furniture is kept out of landfills annually through Envirotech’s varied programs. Their circular approach to salvaging and repurposing office furnishings using innovative remanufacturing processes has been shown to reduce the environmental impact of furniture by 80%. And organizations are starting to take notice.

2022 Cushman & Wakefield @ Google Sustainability Award.

Invited to participate in the Facility Innovation Fair held at the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California, in May 2022, Envirotech was awarded the 2022 Cushman & Wakefield @ Google Sustainability Innovation Award for demonstrating how remanufactured furniture can help organizations reduce their carbon footprint. The purpose of this three-day event was to showcase for facility managers innovative solutions for elevating the occupant experience in the workplace, improving occupant health and safety, changing companies’ approaches to furniture reuse and asset management, and increasing sustainable practices across the industry.

Envirotech was joined by 35 other exhibitors and nearly 600 attendees. Each exhibitor was judged on the innovation they believed would have the most measurable impact on driving positive change in commercial real estate. Demonstrating the detrimental environmental effects discarded office furniture has on our ecosystem, Envirotech was awarded first prize in Sustainability for their ability to remanufacture at scale.

Six years ago, Andy Delisi was looking for a role at a business that strived to be innovative, do good for the planet, and get people excited about sustainability. He found that opportunity as a Business Development Manager at Envirotech. Based in Ontario, Canada, the company works with enterprise-level organizations to remanufacture pre-owned furniture, fixtures and equipment (FF&E) and reintroduce them to commercial markets across North America. 

When Andy met Rheaply’s Chief Impact Officer Garr Punnett, it felt like they were “speaking the same language” from their very first meeting. It was clear both organizations shared aspirations for bringing the circular economy to life. The companies began working together with a warehouse cleanout for a large tech company, which has since grown into a thriving partnership.

Andy currently facilitates Envirotech’s partnership with Rheaply to help clients refurbish their workplaces’ FF&E that are then exchanged on the Rheaply platform. There’s much that Andy is excited about for the Rheaply and Envirotech partnership. With every conversation between Rheaply and Envirotech, “We learn something new about how we can develop both of our innovative platforms to take things to the next level.”

Rheaply talked with Andy to learn how companies can become their own original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to furnish their workplaces with high-quality FF&E at competitive prices—all while keeping materials circulated and out of the landfill.

The fast furniture problem today 

Fast-furniture is an indisputable problem at the individual level; our world is addicted to cheap products that are not built to last and use materials that make repairs almost impossible. But Andy is quick to point out that “the everyday person also works for organizations that are throwing out millions of tons of fast-furniture every year” because they face too many obstacles when trying to rehome unwanted FF&E.

There is a pervasive stigma around remanufacturing, reuse and refurbishing that conjures images of unsightly ‘used’ products for consumers. Built environment professionals for commercial spaces might avoid using secondhand products out of fear that they will reflect poorly on the image of Fortune 100 or 500 companies. 

Even organizations that are committed to rehoming used FF&E encounter logistical hurdles. According to Andy, the “biggest pain points come down to planning and making it as easy as possible to understand what your options are.” When an organization owns lots of assets across buildings, locations, and campuses, they are often not redeployed or used in the most effective way possible. Outdated spreadsheets and floor plans are passed along from one facilities manager to the next, making reuse within an organization complicated, inefficient, and time-consuming. 

Companies such as retailers and tech companies often use FF&E that is custom-made to their workplaces. But the cost of decommissioning used FF&E can be daunting, especially if it is not easily outfitted to other spaces. 

Andy personally isn’t against solutions like recycling or carbon offsets, but points out that they aren’t effective long-term solutions. “It’s really understanding that the problem is happening and diversion from landfill once is not true circularity – it’s about materials being put to full and active use for the duration of their lifespans.” 

What is an OEM?

OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer. This refers to an organization that makes equipment from parts sourced from other organizations.

The opportunity

As a company that helps clients with facility move outs, Envirotech has seen firsthand how “everyone is rethinking space right now—planners are even thinking two to three years ahead of how to move out of an office space.” 

Companies that rely on specialized FF&E for their workspaces can become their own OEM to have more control over their supply chain. By salvaging products that would typically be going to landfills and repurposing them, companies also have greater quality control and reduced costs. This also helps significantly lower organizations’ carbon footprints by mitigating the negative environmental impacts that the extraction of both raw and recycled materials has on our ecosystems.

Outsourcing that production to an OEM can be cheaper, especially at scale. An OEM model is more cost-effective for startups and smaller companies that don’t have their own established production lines either domestically or abroad. Manufacturers still keep all trademarks and intellectual property rights of your designs and products. 

Relying on third party OEMs does have drawbacks. It can take time and effort to find reliable suppliers of OEM, which might also require guaranteed volumes of custom product order.

Envirotech’s role

Envirotech is an example of an organization that functions as its own OEM. By having in-house expertise to repair and refurbish used FF&E, and the ability to source parts from its own inventory, Envirotech is able to recirculate goods without solely having to rely on outside vendors. 

Traditional manufacturers are constantly innovating and redesigning their furniture so they can sell you the latest and greatest from their product lines. Envirotech and its partners have a vested interest in keeping up with trends and innovating with already-extracted materials. Refurbishment prevents having to add new products and materials into circulation, and gives FF&E new life. Once partners of Envirotech see the quality of restored and reupholstered products firsthand, they realize it’s “a no-brainer” when looking for high-end furniture at bargain prices, including brands like Herman Miller.

Envirotech fills in logistical gaps for companies that they might not even know exist. They provide high-touch support that is crucial to ensuring all aspects of a move-out and furniture tack-back process run smoothly. They perform a site evaluation, collect detailed inventory data, take lots of asset photos, and enter all that manually into a database. Planning ahead is essential to rehoming as many items, and Envirotech’s options become more limited when brought on last-minute to a project.

How to introduce remanufacturing and reuse in your own organization

If you want to introduce reuse at your own organization, make it easy for stakeholders to understand the different options and benefits of reuse for built environment professionals and consumers alike. Many organizations are coming from the perspective of reducing carbon emissions and zero waste goals, but “the other big component is really the economic impact and cost savings that come from effective remanufacturing and reuse.” The majority of organizations come to Envirotech because they want high-end furniture without the high-end price—who wouldn’t want to save 30% on all furniture buildouts without losing quality and helping the environment?

“A comprehensive analysis of an organization’s furniture assets is the first step towards becoming your own OEM,” says Andy. “Understanding exactly what can be reused, remanufactured and repurposed will give organizations a new, sustainable outlook on furnishing office space and renovating existing buildings.” Often the problems that can be solved by reuse are “hiding in plain sight,” such as inventory sitting in warehouses or equipment gathering dust in utility closets. 

We also need to disincentivize throwing away reusable items by incrementally incorporating reused materials. Tenders are one example that Andy cites as an effective policy for driving circularity at the municipal level, and sees this approach extending into company policies as well. If every organization required projects to contain a certain percentage of reused materials, the demand for circular solutions would increase.

Planning in advance has ripple benefits across your projects and organization. If the timing is right, the resale value of goods can outweigh the cost of decommissioning FF&E.

With Rheaply you can know where assets are and then work with partners like Envirotech to plan your options months or even years in advance, extending the time and amplifying the values saved.

Rheaply and Envirotech: growing together

Envirotech envisions a future where circularity reduces the amount of extracted materials required to make new furniture by innovating and redesigning existing products that can be remanufactured. Envirotech’s long-term client partnerships are key to its ability to remanufacture and rebuild FF&E to use for generations to come. Rheaply provides the exchange platform where this exchange and collaboration can flourish.

Andy sees a number of impacts from the Envirotech and Rheaply systems coming together. 

Envirotech and Rheaply both recognized a need for places where reuse can happen, both virtually and in the workspace. The Rheaply platform’s enhanced planning abilities make it easier to be proactive in working together to regenerate significantly more value. Users can know when a product will be decommissioned and will be available, which extends the timeframe for redistributing items and increases the chances of that inventory going to market. Asset tracking helps organizations further understand the scale of the reuse problem so that they can shift to a lasting solutions.

Now when Envirotech employees like Andy start a new project, they use Rheaply to collect data and catalog inventory to immediately know immediately what’s available without having to physically go out to sites. Andy enthused that “every day we look at how Rheaply’s product makes the efficiency and accuracy part of the equation of understanding assets so much easier and … so much more proactive that working together we can reclaim and regenerate significantly more value than we could have done alone.” 

But Andy’s most important takeaway is that “together we can make a significant impact,” not just with Rheaply and Envirotech, but all organizations working in the circular economy. “If every manufacturer in the world introduced their own refurbishing programs—that’s how we get significant change.”

Two years into the pandemic and the labor situation in the US has become an employee’s market. Today, knowledge workers have grown accustomed to working wherever they want, whenever they want, in response to conditions created by the widespread outbreak. This has caused organizations to shift their perspective about the workplace—prompting them to evolve to become destinations of choice that better attract and retain talent.

Work Behaviors

But becoming a destination of choice doesn’t have to involve adding foosball tables or a smoothie bar to your workplace. Aside from receiving fair compensation and competitive benefits, workers want to be ensured that their fundamental needs are being met and that they are being well-supported to perform their jobs. This calls for creating inspiring workspaces that address all the behaviors of work—one that balances independent work and learning along with personal connection and engagement.

For over 55 years, SAFCO has paid close attention to what people need to be effective in the workplace. This has allowed us to identify people’s behavioral needs and activities as they successfully work alone and together. Our research has found that the four primary activities that drive progress and productivity within organizations are the ability to focus, learn, share, and create.

Being able to concentrate and contemplate is what most employees cited as being the primary advantage of working from home. To appropriately support this crucial work behavior and bring employees back into the workplace, organizations must provide areas that allow for distraction-free downtime and concentration.

This does not mean every employee has to have a private office. A more sound design strategy would incorporate a mix of enclosed spaces and designated quiet nooks that enable heads-down individual work or focused engagement with others to accomplish goals.

According to the Harvard Business Review, organizations with a strong learning culture are 52% more productive and experience engagement and retention rates 30-50% higher than their peers.

Businesses everywhere are in pursuit of a highly engaged workforce. Countless workplace surveys have shown that highly engaged employees are motivated by and actively participate in growth and development opportunities at work.

To stimulate learning activities and facilitate information sharing, workplaces should provide adaptable spaces designed to support knowledge transfer and interactive learning in various forms, whether that involves live instruction with a large group or a smaller mix of in-person and virtual participants. These spaces need to prioritize comfort and flexibility to accommodate all the ways workers gather information and grow their knowledge.

One of the primary reasons workers consider the physical workplace as still relevant to their success is the opportunity to see and be seen. People are inherently social creatures and appreciate occasions to connect and converse face-to-face. They want to be able to share a part of themselves with others and forge necessary bonds. And this type of social connection and its impact on belonging matter to employers as well.

According to Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends 2021 report, 73% of organizations stated that fostering a sense of belong was important to their success, with 93% agreeing that it drives organizational performance.

The workplace can support these vital activities by offering vibrant spaces that encourage spontaneous interaction. Access to inviting lounge areas, break rooms, and common spaces increases opportunities for workers to come together and establish a sense of community with each other.

It’s widely recognized that the best ideas don’t develop in a vacuum.

That’s why 94% of organizations feel that the physical office’s ability to enable effective collaboration is considerably important, according to a PwC Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2022 survey.

For workers to make new discoveries or develop the ideas that propel businesses forward, they need to be supported with spaces that facilitate collaboration, exploration, and creation. And while conference rooms can and do serve this purpose, the integration of more inspiring meeting spaces and maker spaces can go a long way in fostering the act of creation between multiple people or individuals.

How will we know they’re working if we can’t see them?
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Coming in early and staying late is a sign of commitment.
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Workers will take advantage if they have too many freedoms.

This is a huge never-before-in-our-work-lifetime chance to not just reimagine the physical workplace, but to design for diversity and inclusion, equity and belonging instead of compliance or conformity. 

In almost all the conversations we are having with organizations as they grapple with their “return to the office” strategy, we have ended up talking about “means” vs. “outcomes.” Most of us tend to jump to a solution before we have clarified what we are trying to solve for. Instead of announcing a new policy that workers must come in 3 days a week like Apple did back in June (a means to an end), start by defining the “outcomes” you want your organization to create. And once you have those in mind—like strengthening social cohesion and increasing worker effectiveness, or making workers feel included and successfully on-boarding new hires—involve individuals and teams in discussions about how the office or a potential distributed work program can best support those goals.

Make sure those means include factors known to correlate to performance and DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging).

Here are our top five recommendations:

1. Increase the autonomy individuals and teams have over their schedules, presence in the office, and how they get things done. On their website, Gartner recently shared research demonstrating the sizable benefits:
   – “62% of knowledge workers are high performers when afforded significant work flexibility versus 27% of those provided with little flexibility.
   – Employees are 3 times more likely to be high performers when given flexibility over where, when, and how they work.
   – Among knowledge workers, high levels of enterprise contribution are most common among those who are fully remote.
   – Hybrid teams are most likely to show high levels of inclusion (fully on-site teams are least likely).
   And despite widely voiced concerns about culture and innovation,” Gartner “data shows that fully on-site teams are least likely to show high levels of engagement, trust or discretionary effort, are least comfortable taking risks and least likely to provide opportunities to innovate outside of meetings.”
2. Balance those increases in AUTONOMY w/ more attention to interdependence: With more autonomy comes more responsibility to one’s team and other colleagues. Encourage teams to create explicit agreements about how best they will work with each other: When is face-to-face THE best way to collaborate on a particularly wicked problem? What other types of activities/processes is the office best at supporting? How do we help each other “know what each other knows” and strengthen other elements of social cohesion when we are not always physically together?
3. Tolerate greater variety in spatial accommodations, ways of working and those explicit agreements from one team to another. And rather than being afraid to ask for workers’ perspectives, assume that they will rise to the occasion and involve as many employees as possible. If they embrace the outcomes and help shape the means, they are likely to be “all-in” and quite thoughtful (and helpfully realistic) about how best to get there from here. And they will end up with the complement of spaces and resources they need to get their most business-critical work done.
4. Instill in teams a sense of territory and ownership over their neighborhood—especially if you are moving to free-address for workstations or offices. It’s a natural by-product of involving workers, and the science tells us this correlates to team performance. Encourage expressions (totems, physical or virtual bulletin boards, banners, etc.) of their collective identity and pride in their work.
5. Manage that relevant variety and sense of ownership by designing spaces to be way more easily adaptable over time. Said another way, design for things to change. And encourage workers to suggest or even trigger the modifications that improve the effectiveness of space or resources to support their work processes. Things are changing faster and faster, and workplaces must keep up to remain relevant and enabling.

And finally, worry less about having all the answers…better to ask really great questions and trust that you’re surrounded by smart, well-intentioned people who want to help figure this out so that everyone can thrive.

Distributed work is not a binary, one size fits all strategy; it includes a range of work options. Allsteel has established a reliable approach to defining and designing a distributed work strategy that will effectively support  your organization’s work processes, people, and culture.

What you will learn:

• How to define and quantify distributed work for your organization
• Three key questions to consider when developing and implementing a distributed work program 
• The people, technology, and place considerations associated with  distributed work
• Actions to avoid when implementing a distributed work program

How does distributed work factor into an organization’s real estate or workplace strategy within the context of increasingly collaborative work processes, an emphasis on positive workplace experiences, and new definitions of engagement and productivity? And how has this been impacted by COVID? It all starts by assessing what has worked since March 2020 and how that may be adapted into a long term distributed work program.

So, what do we mean by ‘distributed work’?

Distributed work has been part of workplace strategy for years; simply put it is a program that supports employees working at locations outside the office. Many organizations have adopted it in one form or another; many more never considered it viable for their culture, business goals, or work processes. Or to put it another way, organization’s leadership weren’t comfortable with employees working ‘where they couldn’t be seen’, so they didn’t allow it to happen. At least not officially. Of course, COVID-19 changed all that.

When technology advances first enabled distributed work in the 1990s, many organizations seized the opportunity to send workers home, viewing this primarily as a way to reduce real estate costs. Today, we know that in order to be effective, a distributed work strategy must provide balanced support for effective work, an organization’s culture and business goals, as well as making the workplace  inherently more effective and efficient. COVID has not changed this.

While defining and implementing a distributed work program typically takes 8 – 12 month, COVID forced organizations to implement distributed work literally overnight. Today, many organizations realize that distributed work may be a viable long term option for at least a portion of their workforce – large tech companies like Facebook and Salesforce.com, who have traditionally worked under the premise that having their employees work 100% of the time in the office is integral to their innovation and success, are now planning for a major part of their workforce to be working outside the office full time.

So, where was everyone before COVID? And where did they go during COVID?

Well before COVID-19 appeared, occupancy and utilization studies completed over the years by multiple organizations and their workplace consultants have consistently found that knowledge workers are at their desk an average of 35-45% of the time. These findings clearly indicate that work is no longer happening primarily at in the office or at one’s desk.

So, where was everyone? Technology gives users the ability to choose where they work – and often it’s not at their desk. It’s the huddle room, the scrum space, or the café. Or they choose to work outside the office – at a client site, a co-working space, or at home. Regardless of where they are getting their work done, their organization will need to ‘formalize’ what is currently taking place and ensure their employees have the right tools, resources, knowledge, and skills to be fully engaged and effective at their jobs regardless of the place they work.

This changed significantly in March 2020. The Workplace Evolutionaries’ Work from Home Experience Survey found that since organizations began addressing the health concerns related to COVID, 88% of the US workforce was regularly working outside the office each week, and that 77% of the US workforce was working from home 5 days per week.

Kohler’s Seth Stevens shares how the conditions of our space and environment can support our well-being.

Well-being encompasses our physical, cognitive, and emotional health. “By designing spaces that meet our needs for hygiene, safety, and comfort, architects and designers have the power to contribute to well-being on a personal, social, and environmental level,” says Seth Stevens, Chief Designer of Luxury Space at Kohler.

Kohler has been in the business of well-being since its infancy, when it produced its first bathtub in 1883. Out of that heritage comes an understanding that there are many facets to well-being—it is multidimensional, complex, and unique to each individual.

“Well-being goes beyond physical and mental health. It is a basic fundamental state that encompasses our physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional health. The emotional component has become increasingly important at Kohler and reflects a pivotal change in our society’s needs,” Seth said.

He joined us for a Haworth Connect webinar to discuss the dimensions of well-being. The third-generation industrial designer brings his global perspective to the Kohler luxury business, focusing on creating brand-defining kitchen, bath, and lighting products for residential and commercial applications.

Three years ago, Kohler began its “perspective of the year” project to provide a framework for understanding architecture and design within a global context. The purpose is to examine emerging cultural trends and fashion, art, music, politics, business, and lifestyle.

“Our first perspective of the year was focused on style—how individualism was evolving and shaping our interior style narratives. The second perspective of the year was focused on the evolution of luxury and how everyday luxuries are being manifested in our homes. And that leads us to today’s perspective, which is all about the dimensions of well-being,” Seth said.

As the pandemic has accelerated the demand for healthy and sustainable spaces, there’s a new understanding of how interior designers can make a positive impact in the world through their work.

Interior designers have opportunities to address climate, health, and equity issues, said Avinash Rajagopal, Metropolis Magazine Editor-in-Chief and author of Hacking Design. An in-demand speaker throughout the global design world, Avinash joined Haworth Connect to discuss a new industry-wide framework for practicing sustainable interior design.

Currently, the building sector contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and the climate crisis. The industry produces about 39% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, the standard used to measure global warming.

Shift toward Embodied Carbon

About 75% of the industry’s emissions come from operational carbon, which is the energy consumed to operate buildings—from keeping the lights on to running air conditioning systems. The rest is embodied carbon, attributed to building materials and construction.

Embodied carbon is the “energy we use to pull materials out of the earth, turn them into products, bring those products to building sites, and turn them into buildings or interiors,” Avinash explained. It also includes the energy used to remove those products to make way for renovation or new construction, and to dispose of those products—whether they go into the landfill or are recycled or reused.

There is a push globally to convert the energy infrastructure to renewable energy. Between now and 2050, the industry’s current ratio of 72% operational carbon and 28% embodied carbon is going to shift closer to 50/50. Embodied carbon is going to become a bigger share of the world’s carbon emissions, as operational carbon is reduced.

New Focus on Renovation Emissions

Renovations are an elemental part of design work, and embodied carbon emissions are created through them. Interior renovations include furniture, lighting, flooring, walls, ceilings, and everything else that makes up the inside of a building.

“If you’re in hospitality, you’re usually looking to change out the interiors of your properties about every five years,” Avinash said. “If you’re in healthcare, a facilities manager usually is tasked with keeping finishes and furnishings up to date, changing those out every 10 years.”

Workplace leases are also getting shorter and shorter. “So, every time a tenant leaves a building, or a new tenant moves into that space, the interiors get turned,” Avinash explained. “Even companies who own their spaces are refreshing them every five years—sometimes in tech companies, every three years.”

Over the life of a building, interior renovations actually end up being as consequential or more consequential than concrete, steel, glass, and all the building materials that have traditionally been viewed as an environmental problem.